This invention relates to a printing control apparatus and method and, more particularly, to a printing control apparatus and method through which printed matter is output in a state in which it can be bound in book form in a system comprising an information processor such as a personal computer and an output unit such as a printer.
When bookbinding printing is performed using a printer having a double-sided printing unit, i.e., when printing is performed so that the printed pages are arranged in order by folding printed sheets of paper in half, the prior art is such that pages to be printed are accumulated in the memory of the printer and are output after the pages are arranged internally of the printer. In accordance with this technique, four consecutive pages are arranged and printed on one sheet of paper in such manner that the pages will follow one another in numerical order if the sheet of paper is folded in half.
With this conventional method of printing using a printer according to the prior art, bookbinding cannot be carried out unless the printed matter that has been output by the printer is first folded in half sheet by sheet and then arranged so that the proper page order is obtained for the entire document. Consequently, the user must fold each sheet of the paper in half one sheet at a time. This entails a great amount of labor on the user's part if the number of pages is large.